


please don't leave me alone

by corinneclara



Category: DCU (Comics)
Genre: F/M, hope it's okay, that probably shows a lot tbh, um this is kind of an unplanned let's-see-how-it-goes-as-i-write-it kind of thing so yeah
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-05
Updated: 2016-09-05
Packaged: 2018-08-13 06:38:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7966402
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/corinneclara/pseuds/corinneclara
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>an angst-turned-fluff piece abt phonecalls at two am and the pressures of long-term vigilantism. xx</p>
            </blockquote>





	please don't leave me alone

Dick Grayson turns over again in his bed, the blankets twisting around his legs so tightly he isn’t sure how he will untangle himself in the morning. The night sky peeks through the window of his bedroom, and he stares out at the blinking lights of Gotham City. The world never stops there, and he feels the familiar itch in the back of his mind. He needs to be out there, needs to scour the corners where the streetlights don’t shine and sharp smiles and sharper knives make their homes.

He glances down at his decidedly injured leg and the bandages wrapped around his recently fractured ribcage and knows that there is no way of getting out of the house with Alfred having done everything but officially put him under house arrest. He isn’t going to be cleaning up the streets of Gotham for at least another week. And sure, Damian and Steph and Cass can all handle themselves well enough, and Jason is probably protecting Gotham’s citizens in his own denizen-from-hell kind of way (something they really need to have another talk about, damn it, why doesn’t he listen he didn’t sacrifice his hearing when he came back from the dead), but it isn’t the same as being out there himself. Someone could get hurt - one of his teammates could get hurt - and he’s lying in bed, sleepless and frustrated.

On the other side of Gotham, in an apartment that looks more CIA communications base than it does home, the night air is cold on Barbara Gordon’s skin as she jerks out of unconsciousness, wide green eyes darting around the room. Her fingers are curled tightly into the cool fabric of her sheets, and she forces herself to study the room. She takes in each individual familiar sight: the gauzy curtains fluttering in the wind from the strip of open window, the light of the clock tower illuminating the pale blue hue of her walls. She desperately searches for some degree of normalcy as the manic laughter echoes in her head, threatening to overwhelm and drag her back into the depths of her nightmares.

Waking from these nightmares isn’t a first for the former batgirl, and she follows her routine with the expertise of someone who is all too familiar with being jolted from a sleep riddled with memories that would be far better left in the past.

That is, until her phone rings.

She stares at it, not able to make out the name with her glasses on the other side of the room, and fear courses through her from the sudden noise. Her hand hovers over the brightly lit phone for a moment, hesitant, before she forces herself to pick up. She takes a deep breath, expelling the air with a furious huff. She is Barbara fucking Gordon, and she won’t be afraid of answering the phone because a twisted half-man tried to use her life like a cheap bullet, worthless and disposable.

“What do you want?” she says, and her words come out angry and tired. They should, she thinks. She has a lot to be angry and tired about.

On the other end of the line, Dick blinks in confusion. Did he tick her off recently? He doesn’t remember ticking her off. Should he apologise anyway, just in case?

“Um, hey. It’s me - uh, Dick. I mean, it’s Dick, like Dick Grayson, not a dick because I don’t think -”

“Calm down, boy wonder,” Barbara says, the corners of her mouth twitching up in amusement. “I know what you meant.”

“Oh. That’s good.”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.”

Barbara fiddles with the edge of her shirt, confused. “So . . . do I get to find out why you’re calling me at two thirty in the morning? Or do I have three chances to guess?”

“Oh, right - shit, sorry. I just . . .” Dick trails off for a moment, pressing his head back against the headboard as he tries to find a way to phrase this without sounding incredibly weird. “I just wanted to hear your voice.” Shit, was that endearing or creepy?

“Um, okay.” Barbara rubs the sleep from her eye as she takes this in. It had been weeks since she’d last seen him in person, and days since they had spoken on the comms alone. “Where is this coming from?”

Dick glances down at his bandages again and holds back a sigh. “I’m just having a shitty night. I can’t be out on patrol and they’re all out there by themselves, and I just worry that something’s gonna happen. Something always seems to happen, and if it does I won’t be there and . . . fucking hell, how did he do this?” He hadn’t noticed the few tears of frustration he’d shed, but found his hand wet when it dropped from his face.

“I don’t know.” Dick sits up a little straighter, not expecting Barbara to answer that question. She pulls the sheets a little tighter around her waist as she speaks, her words uneven and uncertain. “I don’t know how, but he was damn good at it.”

“Yeah,” Dick mutters. “He was. I don’t know how I thought I could replace him.”

Barbara shakes her head, forgetting for a second that he can’t see her. “You can’t,” she whispers. “But you shouldn’t try to. You can do things he never would have let himself try, Dick - don’t try to be him. Try to be - try to be the him he wouldn’t let himself be.” She paused thoughtfully. “Did that make any sense?”

“I think so,” Dick says with a small laugh.

“Good. He just -” Babs pauses, the image of Bruce’s worried eyes and a peal of maniacal laughter flashing through her mind. She shakes her head, trying to physically remove the nightmares from her thoughts. “- he couldn’t always save everyone anyway. Trust me, he didn’t set the bar that high.” Her attempts to keep the bitterness from her voice fail, but she hopes Dick won’t notice. Of course he does.

“Are you . . . um, are you still having them? The nightmares?”

_Damn you and your concern for others, boy wonder._

“Uh, yeah. Yeah, a bit. Sometimes. I don’t remember mentioning them to you though.”

“Alfred said something about them a little while ago, actually . . .”

_Damn you and your concern for my emotional stability, Alfred._

“. . . And Dinah made me swear not to mention it, but she let it slip a few months ago, too.”

“Can I trust nobody with secrets anymore?” Barbara mutters, feeling her cheeks flush. She shouldn’t be embarrassed, she knows that, but she can’t help it. She feels like a little kid, scared of what lurks in the darkness, reaching for the light switch and complaining about a bad dream.

“Not in this family, I don’t think,” Dick replies, uncertainty holding his next words back. He doesn’t want to pry, he really doesn’t, and he knows they aren’t as close as they used to be and Babs can take care of herself and that’s probably exactly what she’s going to tell him if he asks, but he has to make sure she’s okay.

“They aren’t too bad, are they?”

He wants to smack himself for being so damn awkward - _seriously, Grayson? “Not too bad”? Really?!_ \- but before he has the chance to backtrack, Babs is speaking in a voice he hasn’t heard since before he left for Bludhaven.

“Sometimes. I try to ignore them but . . . I don’t know. It wasn’t the end of my life, but it . . . I mean, he nearly killed me. I could’ve died. That wasn’t nothing.” Her words are punctuated with deep breaths, as she forces out the words she’s only been able to think about before. They need to be spoken, need to leave her tongue and dissipate in the cool night air. They leave a bad taste in her mouth, but a weightlessness in her chest that she didn’t think possible.

“I was in a puddle of my own blood in my dad’s apartment - it was supposed to be safe there, I wasn’t supposed to be Batgirl there. I was just Barbara, but she became a target too . . . It was supposed to be safe.” A breath catches in her throat, and she takes a moment to calm down, swallow the fear and push through her thoughts. “Trust me, Dick, there are things even Bruce Wayne couldn’t do. He wasn’t perfect, so you don’t have to be. All you can do is try, okay? That’s all any of us could ever do.”

The silence on the line is deafening, and Dick is staring at the Gotham skyline, as if he might catch sight of Cass or Steph or Damian leaping their way amidst the skyscraper lights. They would be this tired one day, would call someone at two thirty in the morning and whisper about nightmares and old wars that they wished they didn’t have to fight. Babs quietly wipes at her eyes with the heel of her hand, blinking away stray tears and memories she doesn’t want to see. In this digital silence, with their twisted blankets and tired heartbeats, they could just stop being Batman and Oracle, Robin and Batgirl, for a little while.

“I don’t think I’m gonna go to sleep for a bit,” Babs says softly, tugging a sheet further up her chest as she leans back against the wall. “If you want to, I can just hang up -”

“No.” Dick manages to keep his voice down, although he can’t hide the tinge of desperation. “Please just - just don’t hang up, okay? I need another minute of . . . _this_. Please don’t leave me alone.”

Babs nods, more to herself than Dick. “Got it, boy wonder.”


End file.
